It’s embarrassing, to say the least, a man six-foot-two, well-built and in his early twenties, is stuck in bed coughing his lungs out. What’s worse is it seems that his coughing fits always start when the cute male nurse comes in to check up on him.

Yifan doesn’t even know where the hell on earth he got his pneumonia from. But he’s pretty sure coming in to work after catching the flu and visiting his sick friend at the hospital might be some of the reasons or what collectively caused him to be bound in a hospital bed, in a semi-private room he shares with two other guys who not only share the same room but the same fate as well. Unlike Yifan though, these two have regular visitors that they tend not to get bored with the usual flow of people coming in and out to see them. The tall Chinese male, rarely had anyone coming to see him and check up on him. He has only been admitted for a day but it already feels like eternity without someone to talk to. It doesn’t help that his neighbors’ curtains are always drawn for their own privacy.

The boredom is broken though when the week changed and ensured him a new nurse, in exchange for the grumpy middle-aged woman who comes in only to take his vitals and give him his medications, asking how his sleep was or the color of his sputum. Never has he seen himself having such a conversation with anyone before, explaining how the product of his coughs is blood-tinged all the time. Thankfully though, the new nurse breaks the monotony, introducing himself as Yixing, a fellow Chinese. They hit it right off the bat, being comrades, they would usually have their exchanges in their native tongue which made Yifan comfortable around the nurse, who he later finds out is only a year younger than him.

Yifan is not a morning person, so when the time came for Yixing to come in to take his blood pressure, respiratory rate, pulse rate, temperature and regulate the fluids he’s hooked to, he covers himself in the many pillows that he asked Lu Han to retrieve from his place, in hopes to shoo the nurse away and get more sleep.

The patient hears the curtain rings rattle against the metal rod they are looped on but he doesn’t move from beneath the pile of pillows he has buried himself in and waits.

“Yifan?” He hears Yixing’s confused voice, a hint of amusement at the edge of it as he walks closer to the patient’s bed. The day before, Yifan asked him to stop calling him Mr. Wu or Sir because he felt uncomfortable and instructed the nurse to just call him by his first name.

“Fight me.” Yifan suddenly says, pulling the pillow closer to his head to hide himself better. He hears Yixing giggle, the sound ringing in his ears and tickling his imagination. The patient almost pulls the pillow down to get a glimpse of what the nurse looks like but before he gets to do it, Yixing removes the one covering his face and smiles down at him, the dimple that Yifan noticed the day before appearing again on the nurse’s right cheek. He almost reached a hand out to poke it.

“Maybe later.” Yixing places the pillows on the chair before retrieving his sphygmomanometer and the thermometer on Yifan’s bedside table. It was quiet for a while as Yixing pumps air into the cuff before deflating it to check the elder’s blood pressure. He then moves to check Yifan’s pulse rate, dimpling at the elder as his other hand reaches for the thermometer that has started beeping to alert Yixing that it’s done with its job. The nurse then informs Yifan that he still has a fever before he jots down his findings onto the paper on his clipboard before checking the IV hooked to the patient.

“Do you want me to recline your back so you can sit?” Yixing places the clipboard on the bedside table and retrieves the pillows to return them beside Yifan, “You’ll be able to breathe better when you’re upright.” The elder nods and watches Yixing press the button so the part of the bed where his back is will rise slowly. “Breakfast will be brought in soon so I’ll return after about an hour so you can take your meds.” Yixing informs him, pulling the curtains on Yifan’s side of the room so the sunlight can flood in.

“Okay.”

Yixing seems to hesitate as he draws the curtain back, then at the last second he pops his head back in and says, “Don’t ask the orderly to fight you. He might engage you in a brawl.” Yifan colors and nods then the nurse prances away after closing the curtain to check on the other patients under his care.

Yifan thought he was good